The Ghost Named After Me

July 5, 2011

Last summer, one of my good friends was moving into off-campus housing with his roommates. I didn’t go to the school, but I wanted to take summer classes there. The landlord seemed like a fairly decent guy, the house was in good shape, and I got along real well with all of the other guys moving in. A few months later, I had decided that I was joining the Army, and would be at basic training halfway through the lease. They were able to find another roommate pretty quickly, however, my name was still in the first draft of the lease. Since my friends apartment was an upstairs one, the downstairs neighbors got the lease with my name on it. They were understandably confused when they met their upstairs neighbors, and there was no SlimJim89.

Cue the weird shit.

Two of the downstairs neighbors, we’ll call them Emma and Claire, took summer classes and stayed in the apartment during the summer. They began hearing noises at night; it sounded like someone was moving furniture around in the attic, scratching on the walls, and dropping heavy things on the floor. They freaked the fuck out, and by the time everyone else moved in, the consensus was the house was haunted. All the ghost seemed to do, though, was make a lot of loud noises, so they didn’t call in the Ghost Hunters or anything. A little while later, they started calling the ghost ‘SlimJim89,’ after the guy who was on the lease but mysteriously never showed up.

This Halloween I went to a party thrown by the downstairs neighbors, and finally heard about this ghost. I went up to the attic, where the dancing was, to get my drink on when I ran into Emma. So we’re standing around, talking about how there’s this poltergeist with my name, when the music just shuts off. There’s no one by the computer that was playing the music, no one near the speakers, and all the wires are still plugged in. A minute or two later, the music comes back on blasting, then quiets down, then stops. It comes on full-force again, then goes to the normal volume. Emma flips the fuck out (she was pretty intoxicated at this point) and leaves pretty much about to cry. I stay upstairs with this guy who was dressed as the cookie monster (except he was the weed monster,) talking about this mischievous spirit, when the lights just turn off, and when they turn back on, the computer playing the music is lying on the ground. I decided that, fuck that, I was not sticking around with this shit going on, and went downstairs and subsequently got wasted and made out with this completely gorgeous 10 who was dressed as this sexy cop. But that’s neither here nor there.

There's a possibility all of these stories are the result of drugs, mental illness, physical illness, stress, sleep paralysis, dreams, or natural phenomena misidentified. That all of these stories are the result of the story teller lying or exaggerating.
But out of all the hundreds of stories here there is also the very real possibility that perhaps one is the absolute truth, that one has no other possible explanation other than the supernatural.
The question is, which story is it and what would that suggest about the universe.